This video is over a year old, but perhaps even more pertinent considering world challenges facing us today (US inflation, growing oil costs, changing geopolitical climate in Russia, etc, etc.)… But really, you must watch this video. The message is of course fantastically important and the charting and data visualization is just amazing. He makes such difficult concepts easy to understand through a clever use of animation and humor.
Found this via FutureFeeder (which is in desparate need of an update!)
Some golfing, though. Feels good. The weather is looking nice and it’s Saturday, so there. But, before I go and enjoy the day, here are some really cool links for you to check out. A couple very talented friends of mine at cascadingstyle.net have a series of posts detailing their SMS/Drupal/Services/Flash integration project. That’s right. SMS. Drupal. Flash. All connected via web services. Displayed live on giganto screens for all to see. 1000 people in the audience. It was really cool. Here’s a video from Vimeo that shows a little bit about the show. I helped out by writing a generative screensaver that played while everyone enjoyed their dinners.
A previous post detailed the simple algorithm for the underpainting technique I have been messing around with in order to attempt an “impressionistic” style. I have spent a little more time working with it and in addition to the broad brush strokes that lay the base color, I have made progress in creating a layer of definition to help with the image’s fidelity. Using Flash’s convolution filter to do edge detection is something I had never attempted before and so, to Google I went and found a great post at Quasimondo’s blog, his site is amongst the first I go to when I need inspiration on how to do something, and then stumbled upon a couple excellent tutorials on Sobel, Laplace and Canny Edge Detection written by Bill Green in 2002. I was about to attempt to port that code over to AS3, but then found a developer had already done just that. Alex Petrescu’s very cool implementation of canny edge detection seems to be working pretty well, but I’m not done with messing around with yet. Even, so, I thought I might share a couple images created using this edge detection with my pixel painting. I welcome feedback and suggestions. This has been alot of fun, and I look forward to seeing how it progresses.
Many thanks to Darius and everyone at ColourLovers for making a great, easy to use API, also thanks to Juan Sanchez and the Degrafa team for making Degrafa the best way to draw in Flex. The DekafLovers mashup is currently featured at programmableweb.com as the mashup of the day and they have a nice writeup of it here. This mashup uses a similar codebase to Cooler Kreator, but uses the ColourLovers API instead of Kuler.
It’s great to get people making these patterns, I love seeing the stuff it produces.
Came across this blog post at Fabio Sonnati’s site… It’s a beautiful clip from Heroes Season 2 encoded with H.264 at 500Kbit/sec and it just looks great. 720p, nonetheless! I’d love to know what his encoder of choice is. This is just simply too good to be true. You must go check it out. BTW… I miss Heroes.
I have thoroughly been enjoying messing with my wife’s lovely photos the last couple of days. Her studies in the spring flora have inspired me to try to manipulate them to look like some of her favorite painters. Manet, Monet, Degas, Cassatt… on and on. I personally am an abstract expressionism fan, Klee, Kandinsky, etc., but I thought it might be fun to see what I could do with a minimal amount of code and some great source images. While certainly not a complete study, they are at least a nice diversion from some other work I have been doing lately. Read on to see more. (more…)
If you are developing a Flash piece that makes heavy use of dynamic textfields, pay attention… You may be waiting far too long to test your movies. Flash 8 added a suite of Bitmap Filters, dropshadows, glows, bevels etc. These filters can even be added to dynamic text fields which gives you a great deal of power when it comes to making your interfaces and designs look great. However, there is one big thing you should keep in mind in order to maintain your productivity…
Running “Test Movie” on an Fla file that has dynamic text with filters applied to it is like watching paint dry. Seriously, just try it. Create a few text fields, set them as dynamic and then apply a filter or two to them. The amount of time it takes to export a movie with filtered dynamic text is perhaps 3-5 times longer than exporting the same movie with the text either set to “Static”, or simply removing the filters.
My recommendations? Either create the filters and/or text-fields programmatically, remove the filters during testing and only add them for the final publishing, or simply not use dynamic text fields unless you absolutely have to.
If you take a look at the sidebar of the site now, you’ll notice I ditched the big ole’ Google Ads. This is because I have joined Pistach.io’s Flash Pack and now will be running only that banner in the place of the larger, slower, more annoying Google Ads banners that were in the sidebar before. This will speed up the pages load times throughout the site and reduce the long scrolling sidebar to a more manageable level.
Aral Balkan and Dave Stone from Built By Dave, this network of sites operates under a simple premise similar to the The Deck, run by Coudal Partners. Smaller numbers of ads through a smaller network, placed on good sites that reach people that might actually be interested in the products and services running in that placement. Rates for the ads are really quite reasonable, and the backend is very very solid. It’s built on Amazon’s EC2, S3, and SimpleDB systems. If you are interested in placing an ad on the network please visit Pistach.io.
I’m proud and very happy to be in the Flash Pack with such an esteemed list of bloggers. I’ll let Aral publish that list at his site, but it’s a virtual who’s who in Flash platform blogs. This new ad placement will not change my focus which is and has been my experiments, thoughts and opinions in and around web design/development and creating content in the Flash ecosystem. I welcome your comments and suggestions about this move.
Sidenote… Just to let you know, I have a list of topics lined up in the coming weeks that I think will be valuable content to my readers. A couple book reviews, some more source code, a couple little gotchas and more of the regular commentary on current developments. As always thanks for visiting and continuing to prompt me to write.
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